Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

by Jonathan Rauch

The first criterion for sorting worthy from unworthy beliefs should be: Cause no pain, and allow none to be caused—especially not to the politically vulnerable. Intellectuals should be like doctors. They should first do no harm.”

The right principle, and the only one consonant with liberal science, is, Cause no pain solely in order to hurt.

Utopian systems premised on a world of loving harmony—communism, for instance—fail because in the attempt to obliterate conflict they obliterate freedom.

Liberal systems, although far from perfect, have at least two great advantages: they can channel conflict rather than obliterate it, and they give a certain degree of protection from centrally administered abuse.

The heretic endangered the faith of believers, and so threatened to drag others with him to an eternity of suffering in perdition; not least of all, he threw away his own soul. To allow such a person to destroy souls seemed at least as indecent as allowing racist hate speech seems today.

Humane motives, however, could not save the Inquisition from the same problem that faces humanitarians today: although allowing mistakes is risky, suppressing them is much riskier, because then a “mistake” becomes whatever it is that the authorities don’t like to hear.

Suppressing offensiveness, too, comes at a high cost, since offensiveness is not the same thing as wrongness—often just the contrary. Sometimes patently “offensive” verbiage turns out to be telling the unpopular truth. As I am hardly the first to point out, practically all knowledge of any importance began as a statement which offended someone.

Will someone’s belief, if accepted, destroy society? Maybe. But more likely not.

“Thus far, however, those who have urged the suppression of new views for the ‘good of the people’ have underestimated the ability of both societies and individual people to survive successive challenges to their conceptions of the world and how it works.”

“Do not block the way of inquiry,” must be added, “And by no means should inquiry be blocked to ‘save’ society.”

And here liberal science has been put squarely on the defensive, for the first time in more than a hundred years; for here you have, not the cold-blooded public censor raising bureaucratic objections on behalf of “society,” but an identifiable person saying “I am hurt” and speaking for his own dignity.

So let us be frank, once and for all: creating knowledge is painful, for the same reason that it can also be exhilarating.

Sometimes we have to watch while our notion of evident truth gets tossed in the gutter. Sometimes we feel we are treated rudely, even viciously. As others prod and test and criticize our ideas, we feel angry, hurt, embarrassed.

I am also only too well aware that in the pursuit of knowledge many people—probably most of us at one time or another—will be hurt, and that this is a reality which no amount of wishing or regulating can ever change.

It is not good to offend people, but it is necessary. A no-offense society is a no-knowledge society.

according to the intellectual historian Masao Maruyama, there was no word in Japanese for “opposition,” as distinct from “enmity” or “antagonism,” until one was imported from the West in the nineteenth century.

Criticism would be seen as an attack. Book reviewers typically don’t review books they don’t like. The result is that in Japan ideas tend to be traded on a kind of gray market.

Producing new ideas is hard, and testing ideas, sorting the useful from the empty, is harder. And so intellectual resources lie fallow.

the costs of the Japanese aversion to criticism have been enormous—not just for Japan but for the world. Japan is one of the world’s largest, richest, best-educated, and hardest working nations. Yet she relies on outsiders to set her intellectual agenda; her universities are, by international standards, backwaters; her record on intellectual innovation is bleak.

The price of the no-offense society is high. Too many people today are forgetting this.

They think you can keep knowledge and get rid of pain. They are epistemological pacifists, enjoying the products of critical inquiry while righteously condemning any unpleasantness which they see in the products’ manufacture.

A liberal society stands on the proposition that we should all take seriously the idea that we might be wrong.

liberal science is built on two pillars. One is the right to offend in pursuit of truth. The other is the responsibility to check and be checked.

intellectual license checked by intellectual discipline.

am the first to grant that in practice it is often difficult to tell the debunked from the offensive; we will have to argue. But the important thing is to keep our principles in sight: in a liberal society, to upset people is not, and must never be, the same thing as to be wrong.

What do you do about people who have silly or offensive opinions and who haven’t bothered to submit to the rigors of public checking? Ignore them.

one must try to be thick-skinned, since the way we make knowledge is by rubbing against one another.

Some people believe that the Russians are reading their minds with microwaves; other people fret about French classes that might inadvertently upset balding men. In a liberal society, the initial presumption ought to be that neither kind of concern deserves any better than to be politely ignored.

In one sense the rise of intellectual humanitarianism represents an advance of honesty: it drops the pretense that liberal science is a painless and purely mechanistic process, like doing crossword puzzles.

This, finally, is where the humanitarian line leads: to the erasure of the distinction, in principle and ultimately also in practice, between discussion and bloodshed.

For you do not have to be Kant to see what comes after “offensive words are bullets”: if you hurt me with words, I reply with bullets, and the exchange is even.

What do you do about violence? You establish policing authorities—public or private—to stop it and to punish the perpetrators. You set up authorities empowered to weed out hurtful ideas and speech. In other words: an inquisition.

But universities are neither churches nor finishing schools: their mission and moral charter, their reason for being, is not to convert errant minds or to teach good manners. Their mission is to advance knowledge by teaching and practicing public criticism.

Trace their logic and you find that they all lead back to the same conclusion: freewheeling criticism (thus liberal science) is dangerous or hurtful and must be regulated by right-thinking people.

Whenever anyone says that bigoted or offensive or victimizing or oppressing or vicious opinions should be suppressed, all he is really saying is, “Opinions which I hate should be suppressed.”

The answer to the question “Why tolerate hateful or misguided opinions?” has been the same ever since Plato unveiled his ghastly utopia: because the alternative is worse.

The unhappy reality is that some people are always going to say gross and vicious things to hurt other people. If they don’t destroy property or do violence, ignore them or criticize them. But do not set up an authority to punish them.

Suppose a creationist collapses in tears and drops out of college after a biology teacher declares that Darwin was right? Is that a “laceration”? Should it be stopped?

Faced with this problem, very often the humanitarians retreat to the position that some people—historically oppressed groups—have a special right not to be upset.

The fact that you’re oppressed doesn’t make you right. In the second place, who is going to decide who is allowed to upset whom? The only possible answer: a centralized political authority.

The whole point of liberal science is that it substitutes criticism for force and violence.

The false choice presented by humanitarians is between wounding people with words and not wounding people with words. The real choice is between hurtful words and billy clubs, jail cells, or worse.

The conventional wisdom now in many American universities seems to be that you can’t have free thought or free speech where people, especially members of minority groups, feel intimidated, harassed, upset. Thus, if you get rid of talk which upsets or intimidates, you add to intellectual freedom.

If you insist on an unhostile or nonoffensive environment, then you belong in a monastery, not a university.

Look also at the Orwellian nature of the attack. It basically says that the more you stifle upsetting (e.g., “intimidating,” “demeaning”) speech and thought, the more “free” everybody becomes—so that the most “free” intellectual regime is the one with the most taboos on criticism.

As with Plato’s policy, so with Emory’s. The agenda is always the same: stifle ideas you hate in the name of a higher social good.

What easily can blow up reasoned debate, of course, is the attempt to regulate it from the outside.

Harsh, even vicious, criticism spurs just the sort of debate which turns the heat of conflict into the light of knowledge. And so silencing strong criticism does not “balance” an argument; it eviscerates it.

In other words, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. The answer, as George Orwell said, is, yes, but where’s the omelet?

The Inquisition failed to keep Copernicanism down. All it did was slow the progress of knowledge and kill people. The new inquisitions won’t work any better.